troops and supplies; while the rival military factions fought, sword in hand, in front of the imperial palace, and filled Constantinople with pillage and massacre. The janissaries, who were supported by Kiosem, for some time maintained the ascendency; but this ambitious princess was at length cut off by an intrigue, in the interior of the harem, fomented by the mother of Mohammed, who suspected her of a design to prolong her own sway by the removal of the sultan, in favour of a still younger son of Ibrahim. Seized in the midst of the night of September 3, 1651, by the eunuchs whom her rival had gained, Kiosem was strangled (according to a report preserved by Evliya) with the braids of her own long hair; and the sultan was exhibited at daybreak by the grand-vizir Siawush-Pasha to the people, who thronged round the palace on the rumour of this domestic tragedy, to assure them of the personal safety of their youthful sovereign.
The supreme power was now lodged in the hands of the young Sultana Walidah, and her confidant the Kislar-Aga; but their inexperience was little qualified to encounter the task which had wellnigh baffled the energies of Kiosem; and the expedient of frequently changing the grand-vizir, in obedience to the requisition of which ever party was for the time in the ascendant, prevented the measures of government from acquiring even a shadow of consistence or stability. Twelve vizirs, within eight years from the deposition of Ibrahim, had successively held the reins of power for short periods; and not less than six had been raised to, and deposed from, that precarious dignity, within the last ten months, while the audacity of the troops, and the helplessness of the executive, had reached an unparalleled climax. In a memorable insurrection, arising from the depreciation of the coinage, which marked the spring of 1656, the revolters, not contented with their usual license of plunder and bloodshed, forced their way into the palace, and exacted from the young sultan the surrender of two of his favourite domestics, who were instantly slaughtered before his eyes; while various obnoxious public functionaries were dragged to the At-meidan, and summarily hanged on the branches of a large plane-tree;4 and for several weeks this proscription was continued, till the cry of "Take him to the plane-tree!" became a watchword of as well-known and fearful import, as that of "A la lanterne!" in later times. In this emergency, when the fabric of government seemed on the verge of dissolution, an ancient Anatolian pasha, Mohammed-Kiuprili, who had lately repaired to the capital, was named by her confidential advisers to the Sultana-Walidah as a man whose eminent discernment and sagacity, not less than his fearless intrepidity, rendered him especially fitted for the task of stilling the troubled waters. In opposition to these views it was contended, that the poverty of the proposed premier would prevent his securing the adherence of the troops by the largesses which they had been accustomed to receive, and the project was apparently abandoned; but the incapacity and unpopularity of the grand-vizir, Mohammed-Pasha, (surnamed Egri, or the Crooked,) soon made it obvious that a fresh change alone could prevent another convulsion. On the 15th September 1656, therefore, in a fortunate5 hour for the distracted empire, Kiuprili was summoned to the presence of the sultan, who had now, nominally at least, assumed the direction of affairs, and received from his hands the seals of office.
Such were the circumstances of the elevation of this most celebrated of Ottoman ministers, whose name stands pre-eminent, not only from his own abilities and good fortune, but as the founder of the only family which ever continued to enjoy, during several generations, the highest honours of the empire. He was the son of an Arnaut6 soldier, who had settled in Anatolia, on receiving a timar or fief in the district of Amasia, near the town of Kiupri, ('the bridge:') from which (since distinguished from other places of the same name as Vizir-Kiupri) his descendants derived the surname under which they are generally mentioned in history. He commenced his career as a page in the imperial seraglio; which he left for a post in the household of Khosroo, afterwards grand-vizir, who was then aga of janissaries. Passing through various gradations of rank, he held several governments in Syria, and was raised to the grade of pasha of three tails: till, at an advanced age, he obtained permission to exchange these honours for the post of sandjak of his native district, to which he accordingly withdrew. But his retirement was disturbed, in 1648, by the insurrection of Varvar-Ali, pasha of Siwas, who, rather than surrender a beautiful daughter, the affianced bride of his neighbour Ipshir, pasha of Tokat, to the panders of the imperial harem, had raised the standard of revolt, and had been joined by the pasha of Erzroom, Gourdji-Mohammed, (to whose suite the annalist Evliya was then attached,) and by many of the Turkman clans of Anatolia. The Sultana-Walidah herself, who was then at variance with her degenerate son, secretly encouraged the insurgents, who endeavoured to gain over Kiuprili to their party; but as they failed in all their efforts to shake his loyalty, Varvar suddenly marched against him, routed the troops which he had collected, and made him prisoner, with two beglerbegs whom he had summoned to his aid. "I saw these three pashas" (says Evliya, who had come to the rebel camp on a mission from Gourdji-Mohammed) "stripped of their robes and turbans, and fastened by chains round their necks to stakes in front of the tent of Varvar-Ali, while the seghbans, and even the surridjis" (irregular horse) "brandished their sabres before their faces, threatening them with instant death. Thus we see the changes of fortune, that those who were the drivers become in their turn the driven," (like cattle.)
Evliya, who seems to feel a malicious pleasure in relating this mishap of the future grand-vizir, confesses to having himself received a horse and a slave out of his spoils; but even before his departure from the camp, the rebellion was crushed, and Kiuprili released, by the base treachery of Ipshir-Pasha,7 for whose sake alone Varvar-Ali had taken up arms. Won by the emissaries of the Porte, by the promise of the rich pashalic of Aleppo, he suddenly assailed the troops of his father-in-law, and seizing his person, cut off his head, and sent it with those of his principal followers to Constantinople—an act of perfidious ingratitude, which, even among the frequent breaches of faith staining the Ottoman annals, has earned for its perpetrator the sobriquet of Khain, or the traitor, par excellence. After this unlucky adventure, we hear no more of Kiuprili in his Anatolian sandjak, till, in the spring of 1656, we find him accompanying Egri-Mohammed on his way to the Porte to assume the vizirat: from which, in less than four months, he was removed to make way for his quondam protégé, in whose elevation he had thus been an involuntary instrument.
Mohamned Kiuprili was at this period nearly eighty years of age, and so wholly illiterate that he could neither read nor write; yet such was the general estimation of his wisdom and abilities, that the young sultan, on entrusting to him the ensigns of office, voluntarily pledged himself to leave entirely at his discretion the regulation of the foreign and domestic relations of the empire, as well as the disposal of all offices of state—thus virtually delegating to him the functions of sovereignty. The measures of Kiuprili soon showed that these extraordinary powers would not be suffered to remain dormant. The impatience of the troops at the strict discipline which he enforced, erelong announced the approach of a fresh tumult; and the ringleaders, in the confidence of long-continued impunity, openly boasted that "the plane-tree would soon bear another crop"—when on the night of Jan. 5, 1657, the grand-vizir, accompanied by the aga of the janissaries, and fortified by a fetwa from the mufti, legalizing whatever he might do, made the round of the barracks with his guards, and seized several hundreds of all ranks in the various corps, whose bodies, found floating the next day in the Bosphorus, revealed their fate to their dismayed accomplices. The Greek patriarch, on suspicion of having endeavoured to engage the Vaivode of Wallachia in a plot for a general rising of the Christians, was summoned to the Porte, and forthwith bowstrung in the presence of Kiuprili; and in the course of a few weeks, not fewer than 4000 of those who had been implicated in the previous disorders perished under the hands of the executioner: "for as in medicine," remarks a Turkish historian, "it is necessary to employ remedies which are analogous to the disease, so by bloodshed alone could the state be purified from these lawless shedders of blood!"
These terrible severities broke the spirit of insubordination in the capital; and the irregularity of their pay, which had been one of the chief grievances of the janissaries, was remedied by the good order which Kiuprili had from the first introduced in the finances. "He proportioned the expenditure of the empire," says Evliya, "to its revenues, which he also greatly enlarged, so that
The Turkish historian, Naima, fancifully compares this plane to the fabulous tree in the islands of Wak-Wak, the fruit of which consisted of human heads, as is fully detailed in the romance of Hatem Tai, besides various passages of the Thousand and One Nights. Under this same plane, by a singular instance of retribution, the heads of the janissaries massacred in the At-meidan in 1826, were piled by order of Sultan Mahmood.
The Turkish annalists do not fail to remark, that Kiuprili crossed the imperial threshold at the moment when the call to noon prayers was resounding from the minarets—an evident token of the Divine protection extended to him!
In a narrative by a writer named Chassipol, (Paris, 1676,) professing to be the biography of the two first Kiuprili vizirs, Mohammed is said to have been the son of a French emigrant, and this romance has been copied by most European authors. But the testimony of Evliya, Kara-Tchelibi, and all contemporary Turkish writers, is decisive on the point of his Albanian origin.
Ipshir Mustapha Pasha was originally a Circassian slave, and said to have been a tribesman and near relation of the famous Abaza. During the revolutions which distracted the minority of Mohammed, he became grand-vizir for a few months, (Oct. 1654–May 1655,) but was cut off by an unanimous insurrection of the spahis and janissaries, who forgot their feuds for the sake of vengeance on the common enemy.
